QJumpers Blog

Writing in Forbes magazine, strategic HR guru Josh Bersin recently said the business mantra when he first entered the workforce in the late 70s was “shareholders first, customers second, employees third”.

“Today this equation has been totally reversed: the CHRO of a large retailer put it clearly: ‘if we take care of our employees first, they in turn take care of our customers, who in turn take care of our shareholders’ … so when employees are unhappy or misaligned your entire business proposition goes out the window. This new idea is becoming clear to more and more CEOs every day, and that puts HR right in the hot seat.”

This begs the major question of how to shift HR strategy so you really understand your staff, compete for talent smartly, recruit efficiently, retain successful employees and understand how to measure business success with employee success.

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, reporting and analytics have been major buzzwords in HR and recruitment for a few years now, 2017 looks to be the breakthrough year in which departments start really using all the information they have at their fingertips.

At QJumpers we have grown our recruitment software and talent pool expertise to be much more than a smart ATS. Realising early on the importance of not only gathering data, but being able to extract it and use it specific to your business, we’ve developed reporting analytics that cover all your recruitment basics such as time to hire, applicant information and active/filled jobs, while also leaving room to tailor individual reports to suit your specific business needs.

But knowing you can access data is not the same as handling that data in Bersin’s “HR hot seat”. So what are the golden rules governing the successful use of data analytics?

1. Ask for the right information to fill your data poolWhere once it was enough to keep the details of applicants on file and then revisit the best ones when new roles appeared, the future of data use in HR and recruitment is going to be tied far more closely to measuring assessment results against both on-the-job success and other successful employees. This boils down to setting the right questions for candidates and understanding the type of traits a successful candidate might display. For example:

• Keep candidate assessments simple so as not to scare off potentially good applicants while broad enough so they can be considered for a wider range of roles than they originally applied for.

• Use tools to examine candidates’ social media profiles to see how closely they match existing successful employees.

• Recruitment assessments are just the start of an ongoing data relationship between employee and employer so use this as the first stage of what Bersin’s CHRO described as taking “care of employees first”.

• Don’t limit information to task-specific questions – data will provide the basis for ongoing assessment and staff management where employment decisions such as advancement can be made on solid evidence not personal opinion.

2. Set and reset benchmarksData is, in effect, simply a set of statistics to be compared against each other and what is expected by the company. This requires the HR professional to have complete trust in the yardstick by which your data is measured. Regular benchmarking requires understanding how a business has changed over a set amount of time and then adapting expectations accordingly – it also allows you to gain a greater understanding of big picture themes and performance. In a rapidly changing business environment where recruiters have to be flexible and fast, and technology regularly outpaces business practice, having a continual process of assessing benchmarks can be the difference between owning data and owning usable data.

3. Learn how to extract data usefullyAt QJumpers we excel at creating intuitive, user-friendly dashboards that convert huge pools of data into usable information on which to make key recruitment decisions. The next big move in HR is likely to be deeper training in how to extract and interpret this information using a range of software tools as well as integrating data from throughout the business to get a clearer overall picture of performance. As the technology improves, having a modular system such as QJumpers makes more and more sense as we’re constantly looking at improved ways to store, extract and analyze information and can then add them into your business recruitment software package.

4. Learn how to use data efficientlyThis is the number one priority for HR departments over the next few years. The type of big data revelations we’re looking at include:

• AI-augmented screening and candidate assessment that can analyze speech and body language to give insights into personality.

• Data trawling of skills and competencies to better match candidates with specific jobs and then perform ongoing analysis to rate those competencies against performance. This gives companies a far greater insight into their workforce, removes assumptions and can go a long way to helping mould a successful recruitment strategy.

• Talent and succession-planning data will be able to key into how engaged and happy employees are giving recruiters predictive analytics on staff and staffing requirements.

• Matching social media profiles of successful hires to those applying for similar roles will create a situation where recruitment software will be able to present shortlists of candidates alongside the probability of them fitting into your workforce.

QJumpers is leading the way at finding innovative technological and time-saving ways to improve recruitment in 2017. To learn more about how we work and how our software can help your company, contact us on 0800 758673, info@qjumpers.co.nz or via our website.